Every now-and-then I’ll hear a news story about a car crash and they’ll say, “The driver was ejected from the car.”
How does this happen, precisely? Does the driver’s (or a passenger’s) body crash through the windshield head-first? Through the door window head-first? Or does the door fly open and the body flies out?
Probably any of the above, depending on just how and where the car body hit something (or was hit).
HOW does it happen? Momentum. The car stops, the driver’s body does not.
(And this is why wearing a seat-belt is important. I’ve personally escaped major injury/death twice due to those buggers, and know one woman whose husband was unfortunately forgetful.)
Yeah, all of the above. The most influential factors determining whether or not someone is ejected from a crash are seat belt use, speed, and whether or not the car rolls over in the crash.
For the most basic scenario an unbelted passenger flies straight through the windshield. Cases where rollover is a factor in the ejection are when someone is more likely to go out through a side door or window.
For whatever reason after seat belt use, speed, and whether or not the car rolled over are accounted for, in general light trucks have the highest rate of ejections in accidents.
There are a lot of videos of drivers being ejected. I’m sure many times the driver is launched through the windshield, but it seems every one I’ve seen has been the driver going out the window or door.
Spoilering for potentially disturbing content.
Thrown during rollover
Another rollover
Hitting a post and walking away from it
Out the door after hitting rail
You can find videos of people being ejected during crashes on youtube. Here are a few that I’ve picked where the ejected person survives. Still, some folks may find these a bit disturbing.
Looking at a couple of the videos, it’s more often the centrifugal force from a spinning or rolling car.
Is that not momentum?
Ten years ago I was traveling on the Interstate in heavy rain. Naturally everyone on the road was going at full speed in spite of the rain. Directly in front of me a pickup in the left lane hydroplaned and started a 360 degree rotation across the road, narrowly missing other cars, smashed through a guardrail like tissue paper, and went spinning down the side of a hill. The hill was covered in thick wet grass. The driver was ejected out the drivers door and landed sitting up in the grass-essentially unharmed but in shock. The truck continued spinning down the hill and into the bank of the river. Start to finish took less than 5 seconds. When we got to the driver he was still sitting on the grass in the rain wondering what had happened. The hydroplaning was so unexpected he didn’t know what had happened. One second he was driving down the road, 2 seconds later he was sitting in the grass in the rain. He was lucky.
The truck never turned over and was spinning all the way down. I imagine the force on the driver and the door must have been a lot.
I was in a rear-end crash back in 2006. The gal driving wasn’t paying too much attention and clipped my right rear corner at 55 mph. I saw this unfolding beforehand and was slowing and moving to the right as I saw her approach.
After being hit my car slewed to the right and slid sideways off the highway. When it finally stopped I was upside down. Unhurt, someone approached my car and I told them they needed to cut me out of my seatbelt. Being upside down I could not release the belt.
Would I have been ejected without the belt? Probably not. But most certainly would have been subjected to some head-bashing when I flipped over.
I’ll never ride in a convertible. I can only imagine what would have happened to me if no roof had been over my head in that crash.
I had a friend that was killed after he was ejected in 1985. He was driving a Honda CRX and lost control. The car rolled and he was ejected or if the open sunroof and killed. Had he been wearing a seat beltehe probably would have walked away.
Certainly not all, but many convertibles have some type of cage system built in. Usually, at the very least, the windshield frame is designed to keep the car propped up in the event of a rollover and many have roll bars behind the front seats, either visible or hidden away and deployed if the car flips.
Granted, no one is saying is as safe as having sheet metal between you and the asphalt, but if you’re wearing your seat belt (properly) and the vehicle is designed well, you shouldn’t end up with a 2000 pounds of car on top of you.
OTOH, my aunt has a Miata. I can see over the windshield when I drive that car. Her (now ex) husband is tall enough that he can’t fit in it with the top down. I suppose flipping that car might result in everyone walking away from it about 5’5’’ no matter how tall they started.
I used to have a convertible Volvo that featured reinforced A pillars and retracted rear cage bars that were designed to pop out if the car ever sensed that it was tilting too far away from the horizontal. I was a little disappointed that I never actually got to try it out.
Way back in the 1950s, my mother survived ejection after being T-boned by a guy who ran a stop sign. There were no seat belts even available at that time, I don’t think. Supposedly the steering column had punched into the driver’s seat, such that ejection saved her life, but I suspect that that part may just be family legend. Mom wears her seat belt nowadays, by the way.
In most cases that I have covered (I’m a news writer) the ejection happens when the vehicle rolls and the person goes through a side window.
Homer: “Seatbelts, pfft. They kill more people than they save.”
Lisa: “That’s not true, you’re thinking of airbags!”
Back in the 1950s and earlier, it was written that the best method of protection was “diving for the cellar”, the space in front of the seats. I think it would take a lot of presence of mind to remember that in time to do it, since you are relinquishing all control at that point. Tom McCahill of Mechanix Illustrated was an advocate.
One of the Grand Prix drivers of that era was talking about a spectacular crash he survived. He described the jolts and spins as he ducked his head for protection.
Then he said, “It all got quiet and I waited a bit until I lifted my head”.
The reporter asked astonishingly, “Why would you wait? Weren’t you worried about a fire”?
He replied, “Sometimes you’re just in mid air.”
Reminds me of my rallying days in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Our club, the Erie Shores Sports Car Club was one of the pioneers in bringing European style performance rallying to the states. I was the navigator and spent most of the time reading the route notes, tracking the mileage and making calculations. Every now and then my driver, Jim, would say in a funny, quiet little voice, “Hang on”.
We were always:
Dennis